Luddites weren’t against new technology, they were against the aristocrats using new technology as a tool or excuse to oppress and kill the labor class. The problem is not the new technology, the problem is that people were dying of hunger and being laid off in droves. Destroying the machinery, which almost always they were the operators of when working on said aristocrat’s factories, was an act of protest, just like a riot, or a strike. It was a form of collective bargaining.

You assume most stock investors read beyond the headline, you assume wrong.

Well, you see, that’s the really hard part of LLMs. Getting good results is a direct function of the size of the model. The bigger the model, the more effective it can be at its task. However, there’s something called compute efficient frontier (technical but neatly explained video about it). Basically you can’t make a model more effective at their computations beyond said linear boundary for any given size. The only way to make a model better, is to make it larger (what most mega corps have been doing) or radically change the algorithms and method underlying the model. But the latter has been proving to be extraordinarily hard. Mostly because to understand what is going on inside the model you need to think in rather abstract and esoteric mathematical principles that bend your mind backwards. You can compress an already trained model to run on smaller hardware. But to train them, you still need the humongously large datasets and power hungry processing. This is compounded by the fact that larger and larger models are ever more expensive while providing rapidly diminishing returns. Oh, and we are quickly running out of quality usable data, so shoveling more data after a certain point starts to actually provide worse results unless you dedicate thousands of hours of human labor producing, collecting and cleaning the new data. That’s all even before you have to address data poisoning, where previously LLM generated data is fed back to train a model but it is very hard to prevent it from devolving into incoherence after a couple of generations.

It crumbles as soon as you ask “facts according to whom?”

It’s OK and straight forward for simple stuff like classical physics. But as soon as you introduce human subjectivity like goals, meaning, taste, art, fun, enjoyment, etc, it becomes useless. What’s the fact based way of sculpting wood with chainsaws and gas torches? And what is payoff? Payoff for whom? In which way? Money, power, influence, efficiency, fame?

Get off the treadmill, not everything needs to be optimal. Most things cannot, by their own nature, ever be optimal. Just sit back and enjoy life for once.

Extra tip: don’t start comments in social media with “no”, or variations. It’s really rude, hostile, and unnecessarily halts constructive discussion. It invites confrontation and it is a fact based way to make you sound like an ass.

Most phone screens today are very hard. A graphite pencil will not do permanent damage. Avoid using metal tip pens and you should be fine.

Didn’t happen in my life, but in the life of a family member and that makes me very happy as well. My sister got a permanent job at a place she did an internship in last year. It’s a job in her career, half the number of hours she is currently doing working at a spa, making more money, and it’s a 90% remote role. She gets to be with her 8yo son, my nephew, almost all the time he is at home now. It also means my brother in law can take more hours at his job, thus overall getting to live more comfortably.

In my country you’d be locked up at a random moment of your stay. Tortured in prison, used as a trading chip in a complex web of international intrigue and diplomacy. Accused of terrorism. Paraded for political manipulation of the masses. Then unceremoniously put in a plane to Canada so US authorities can go pick you up. But it would be very nice and welcoming up to that point.

This part of Twitter

Replacing garbage with sewer water. Not exactly an improvement.

The Hunt for Red October is far more thrilling if not as realistic. The characters are far more unique and interesting, though jack Ryan and anything navy/CIA is just propaganda. At least it is fun to read propaganda.

Some linux installers will refuse to erase the bitlocker partition automatically. Then you have to manually erase it before running the installer.

This is the fuel underneath the 8 years long plot of Barry.

True that, the tri-core PowerPC is quite a unique challenging mess. But underneath it is just the same processor.

My biggest fear is that so far Nvidia has a track record of introducing regressions and new bugs with each new driver version. Just a week ago all my flatpaks weren’t working on Wayland, again. It happens almost with every single update. Some games that are native or platinum randomly stop working and it takes several updates before they start working again. While on AMD everything just works all the time and regressions are solved in a day not weeks. It’s just annoying.

If gaming is top priority. Go all amd, disregard Nvidia. AMD has extraordinary linux support and if it runs on the steam deck it will run on any all AMD machine.

Always remember to disable secureboot and remove bitlocker before installing linux on a oem windows machine. They make it hell to remove that malware from newer machines.

I know it is hard to believe. But the gamecube, Wii, and wiiu are the same machine. Same architecture and family of processors (IBM’s PowerPC). That’s why the wiiu is just a Wii with a beefier CPU (three Wii cores slapped together), and then a newer more powerful GPU sticked to the side. Thats why a single emulator can target all three consoles. The switch 2 will just be a newer version of the Tegra chip.

Have you ever sat in front of a casino’s slot machine. They are also trash, awful and disgusting. But they’re also engineered with the worst dark pattern psychology to manipulate any human being that sits on it to keep playing and be so addictive that people will burn their money just to keep playing. The qualities of fun, and additive are independent of each other. A game can be very addictive and really bad at the same time. Unlike slot machines, they have the advantage of constantly sitting in your pocket and going with you everywhere you go.

I found them when looking for a gaming laptop to buy. A model that was regarded by everyone to be a solid mid range, with a strong cost to performance ratio and sensible cost reducing compromises, was reviewed by UB as the worst thing ever. Their review was a complete outlier and awfully childish and filled with gratuitous insults and aggressive gamer slang language. I ended up buying that laptop and it’s exactly what others claimed, a solid mid performer. I blocked them from my results ever since. I can imagine who their core audience and community is, and it’s exactly the kind of place I never want to visit.

You can go a step further. Lemon is a cleaning agent and was used in households mixed with vinager and baking soda to scrub and clean. So people associated the lemon smell with a cleaned house. It was only natural to use lemon scents in industrialized products. Same reason lavender is also popular. Lavender flowers are incredibly easy to extract the smell and were a common homemade aroma. So it was the first smell industrialized for ambient scenters and cleaners.